5-Minute PRIME: Bite-Sized Investing Insights

In Houston, 4.3% of single-family homes listed for rent were listed for sale within the past three months. The owners tried to sell, couldn't, and became landlords instead. That share has tripled in three years, is more than double the 2.0% national rate, and is the highest of any metro in Zillow's data, as reported by the Houston Chronicle. If you own a house you'd rather sell right now, the question is the same anywhere prices peaked in 2022: sell at a loss, or rent it out and wait? In this...

Across the biggest metros in the country, flat rent has two separate causes. One is a wave of new supply that the market absorbs and moves past. The other is a renter who is already paying 30% or more of their income to rent — and that one does not pass. Where both hit at once, rent has barely moved in a year. And in eight of those metros, every one of them in Texas, Florida or Arizona, unemployment is now rising too. For an owner there, the risk is no longer on the rent line. In this episode...

Two weeks under contract cost you twenty-four basis points. The re-quote landed at 7.70%, and the payment on a $138,750 loan went up by $23 a month. That is the number you spent a week angry about. It is not the number that decides anything. The same spreadsheet that shows the $23 increase also shows the property running $64 a month short — and $41 short at the rate you are mourning. The rate move made a negative number more negative. It did not create it. This is a small, specific, very comm...

There is a warning every new investor hears within about a week of mentioning a cheap market out loud. You'll never be able to sell it. It gets delivered with total confidence, often by someone who has never owned there. It is worth taking seriously, because the thing it is pointing at is real. There are markets where you buy in an afternoon and spend nine months getting out. It is just pointing at the wrong variable — and the substitution is easy to make, because the two usually travel toget...

A tenanted rental, priced at two hundred and forty thousand. The rent is real — someone is already paying it. The financing is lined up. And the lender's number comes back almost thirty-eight thousand dollars short of the asking price. Nothing is wrong with the house. Nothing is wrong with the rent. What most investors do next is treat that gap as a verdict on the price — and it isn't one. Swap the financing program and the gap moves without the property changing at all. In this episode of th...